I was born in Camden, New Jersey, a grubby, eastern industrial city (Campbell Soup, RCA, chemical companies, etc.). During most of my growing-up, my father worked for the postoffice as a clerk. My mother gave private piano lessons.
I grew up in a neighborhood that housed mostly lower income working class people, all religions, white. Many different kinds of kids went to the schools I attended, mostly from working and middle class families. Many were Jewish, like me, but there were Irish Catholics, Polish Catholics, and various Protestants. There were a good many African-Americans as well as us European-Americans. I don't remember meeting any Latinos until I got to California, many years later.
Actually, my father generally worked more than one job. When I was pretty young he had a little business where he operated a lending library out of his car. He'd deliver books to people's homes. Later, he sold insurance.
When I was eight years old or so, my dad decided to go to college. First he had to finish high-school, so for many years he either took night-school courses or worked nights and went to school during the day. One of my fondest memories is drying the dishes after supper while my dad washed them. He would tell me what he'd learned in school that day.
I didn't realize (and maybe he didn't either) that he was really studying.
He managed to finish about two years of college before illness and family pressures forced him to drop out.
I didn't much like school until I got to Junior High School, so I was absent alot from Grade School. Because of that I usually got put in classes with the kids who were behavior problems, so I got to meet a lot of interesting people. When I was in sixth grade I was eleven years old, but half my class were kids who were fifteen. They were just killing time until they turned sixteen and could quit school. (In those days you could actually get left back if you didn't pass.)
When I got to Junior High it got more interesting because we got different teachers for different classes. I'd always been pretty terrible at arithmetic, but in eighth grade I solved one of the problems that had an asterisk on it. I didn't know that that meant it was supposed to be a hard problem. I always liked puzzles, and I just thought of algebra problems as interesting puzzles. My teacher was impressed, and she told me that I was good at math and would grow up to be a statistician. From then on I knew I was good at math. Even if I did lousy on a math test it didn't affect my confidence because I knew I was good at math.
In High School I took all the math courses that were offered, including Solid Geometry in my Junior year. There were five of us in that class, two seniors and three juniors. It was the last time the school offered the course. The seniors recruited the three of us who were juniors because they wanted the course to be given and the school wouldn't do it for less than five students. I really enjoyed that course, partly because the class was so small, but partly because I'd never really had Plane Geometry (my Plane Geometry teacher didn't believe in proving theorems), so it was a major challenge.
After high-school, I went to Cornell University and started out as a physics major. I almost flunked freshman physics and I did really well in math, so I switched to mathematics. Actually it was just a lucky break that I did well in my freshman math course, because on the very first test I had every problem wrong five minutes before I handed in my paper. I changed all the answers when I was going over the test, and I ended up with a perfect paper! Phew!
I was pretty good at math, but in college and later in grad school I met people who were incredibly good at math. By the time I'd been in grad school (at University of Pennsylvania) for three or four years I realized that I didn't want to do research in math. I had a girl friend then who was majoring in philosophy, and I enjoyed arguing with her about philosophical questions, although I generally didn't know what I was talking about. I decided that I'd like to learn philosophy, and I started reading philosophy of mathematics books. I picked a book by Wittgenstein (might as well start at the top!), and I was very impressed by the parts I could understand. I decided to switch to philosophy.
I got a job teaching at San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California, and I enrolled as a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at UCLA. I enjoyed studying philosophy, and got interested in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.
In the sixties I got involved with the radical political movements of the times. I hated to see my students getting drafted and sent to Viet-Nam, so I got trained as an anti-draft counselor. I came in contact with quite a few draft resistors, and I decided to turn in my draft card. I was actually too old to get drafted at the time, but because I turned in the card I was punitively reclassified 1-A, delinquent. That meant my name went to the head of the list, ahead of all the people with draft lottery priority 1.
Giving up my draft card was one of the best things I ever did in my life. I'd been carrying the damn thing in my wallet since I'd turned eighteen, and it was pretty scuzzy. As soon as I turned it in, I felt 20 pounds lighter!
As it turned out, I became a defendant in a class action suit against the Selective Service System (that's the draft board), and that delayed my induction for several years. Eventually we won the case. The main issue was that the Government claimed that military service was a privilege, not an obligation. But they were using reclassification and subsequent induction into the military as a punishment! We claimed that they couldn't have it both ways, and we won.
Around that time some students at Valley State began demonstrating to end various racist practices and to establish ethnic studies departments. One thing led to another and some students took over the Administration Building. That sort of thing was happening at colleges all over the U.S. The students involved (and alot of students who hadn't been involved, but sort of looked like people who'd been involved because their faces were pretty much the same color) got arrested and charged with very severe felonies. I joined a group of faculty members who were working to get amnesty for the arrested students. We called ourselves Faculty for Democratic Institutions (FDI).
what followed was a series of demonstrations at which the police generally tended to over-react, and at one demonstration several students were badly injured. After that, a big demonstration was scheduled for the next day, but the school administration and the police decided not to let it happen. The students decided to hold the demonstration anyway, and the upshot was that more than two-hundred people got arrested, mostly students. I was one of the ten or twelve faculty who were arrested that day.
I had a camera in my pocket on that day, and just after the arrests started I snapped a few pictures. Here are two of them:>
The man being arrested in these two pictures is Archie Chatman, who was one of the leaders of the BSU, the Black Students Union. Archie was an extremely articulate and intelligent leader. Although on some occasions his statements were provocative, I always found them appropriate.
The day I was arrested, I was very scared. I was sure I'd get beat up or raped in jail, but as it turned out my day in jail was pretty tame. The students organized a teach-in and that experience was one of the most educational I've ever had.
Eventually, the police split us into smaller groups. I was in a cell with about twenty or thirty other people. We took turns sitting on the bunk bed. The only other places to sit were the toilet and the floor. Finally, after a very boring afternoon and evening, sometime around 10:30 or 11 p.m., I got bailed out.
Meanwhile, the University administration, impressed with the amount of student sentiment supporting the demonstrators, decided to open negotiations. When I got out of jail that night two of the other busted faculty members and I went straight to a session with the President of SFVSC that lasted until around two or three in the morning. We continued meeting for a few hours a day for some time, and I'd say that the settlement we reached was acceptable. In particular, the University agreed to establish a Black Studies Department (now Pan-African Studies) and a Chicano Studies Department.
I'm really proud of myself for these two actions, turning in my draft card and going to jail with the students. I never had any regrets from the minute I turned in the card or from the minute I lined up with the other faculty members between the line of police and the students. I knew then that they were the right things to do, and I still know it.
I visited several communes and lived for several months at one named Lila. I decided that I'd like to spend the rest of my life there, but the commune was having some financial difficulties, so I decided to go back to SFVSC to teach. I could send Lila money that they needed, and in the meantime they could get some businesses started so the commune could support itself. That turned out to be a pipe-dream. Almost as soon as I got back to California, Lila collapsed.
I did write a book about Lila, but I was never able to get anybody to publish it. It's a very good book. Send me $50 and I'll be glad to make you a xerox copy.
On my next sabbatical, some twelve years later, in 1983, I went to Harbin, People's Republic of China. I'd always wanted to spend some time in a communist country, and I'd been missing winter weather. I also thought it would be instructive to live in a country where people with my skin color were the minority.
China was certainly a communist country, though by the time I got there the government was deeply committed to an incentive system which looks a lot like capitalism to me. Winter weather I got, with a vengence. The temperature was thirty below zero for about four months. And as for the skin color bit, there were eight of us pale-faces in a city of over a million population. And, yes, friends, I was discriminated against.
In 1984, shortly after I returned from China, I got married. This was my first (and so far my only) marriage, and it happened about a month before my fiftieth birthday! My wife, Shari Klein, is probably the most interesting person I've ever met. We've had some tough times and some wonderful times. Together we've learned a good bit about having good relationships.
Shari introduced me to a concept that was new to me. Before we got married I asked her how she'd like us to settle conflicts, and she said that she'd like us to do it by negotiation. That sounded pretty good to me. I think I had a fuzzy idea about arriving at agreeable compromises.
That wasn't what she had in mind. Her concept of negotiation, which is also mine now, is that we negotiate until we come to a resolution of the problem that each of us can see as a win, a win-win solution.
After many years of marriage, we're still working at that concept and learning how to make it work.
In 1971, shortly after returning from my New Mexico sabbatical, my good friend, Jerry Saltzman, who was then teaching at SFVSC in the Philosophy Department, introduced me to a concept called Re-evaluation Education (also known as Co-counseling). This is a philosophy or discipline based on the assumptions that every human being is exceptionally intelligent, that the natural relationship between human beings is loving and co-operative, and that people are naturally zestful. The fact that we get hurt over and over again interferes with these natural qualities. Human beings have natural healing abilities, however, and the outward signs that emotional healing is taking place are crying, trembling, laughing, and tantruming.
We co-counselors facilitate the healing process by getting together in pairs (and sometimes in larger groups) to listen to each other carefully. With this kind of attention, it's common for a great deal of emotional healing to take place.
Over the years, I've received a considerable amount of training in co-counseling, and I've even worked several summers as a one-way counselor at Personal Counselors, Inc. in Seattle, Washington. I've also taught classes in co-counselling.
For the last few years I have been especially interested in working with men. I'm particularly interested in changing men's culture. As a boy I acquired the common belief system that men do not have feelings. I learned to suppress uncomfortable emotions, such as fear, grief, shame, etc. I was also introduced to an extremely violent culture. Just watch almost any TV show or movie; men are portrayed as getting their needs met largely by exercising power and control, and that, usually by violent means.
I've been an anti-war activist for most of my adult life. Now I realize that there is a war going on all around me, a war in which many people, mostly women get killed or have their lives ruined. The name for that conflict is domestic violence.
I've received training to lead groups for domestic violence perpetrators and victims. As part of the training, I co-facilitated groups, mostly men's groups, but sometimes I helped out with the women's groups, too. I enjoyed doing this work and found it very satisfying. I hope to connect with a counseling center where I can cotinue doing anti-violence work.
My retirement plans, at present, are uncertain due to various personal reasons. My wife and I have investigated intentional communities, but have not connected with one that suits us. Click here for information about such intentional communities.
We have also been interested in cohousing communities, and have come pretty close to living at two or three of them. Marsh Commons is up and running. Someday, I may actually live there. It's a community in Arcata, California .
If any of what I've talked about in this biography interests you, and you want more information, ask me. (You can email me from my homepage.)
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